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Since its election in 1997, the UK (New) Labour government has consistently argued that national economic success and social justice depends critically upon boosting the supply of skilled, qualified labour. The recent Treasury-sponsored Leitch review [indexed at TD/IRD 88.157] concluded that 'skills is the most important lever within our control to create wealth and to reduce social deprivation'. In doing so, it recommended the adoption of a series of ambitious qualification targets aimed at equipping the UK with a 'worldclass' skills base by 2020. However, education and training is a devolved issue in the UK and the parliaments/assemblies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have control over this area of policy. This research paper is an expansion of the ideas contained in the SKOPE briefing paper 'Skills policy in England and Scotland after Leitch' [indexed at TD/TNC 95.533] and develops the discussion of the different skills strategies and policies, particularly between England and Scotland. Show less

Upskilling the adult workforce is a major policy across the OECD, and many governments are grappling with the issue of how to design interventions that can support workforce development for less skilled and/or qualified adult workers. This paper examines and compares the English government’s Train to Gain (T2G) program and the Welsh Assembly Government’s Workforce Development Programme (WDP). The paper suggests that these two schemes offer radically different models for adult workforce development. T2G is designed to provide a vehicle whereby a near-universal adult entitlement (to a first level 2 qualification) can be delivered to the entire workforce over time, and has also provided a model for a new funding system for post-19 learning in England. By contrast, the WDP is tied to specific business development/improvement interventions, is only available on a selective basis, and is not solely concerned with funding the achievement of qualifications. The paper offers some thoughts on the relative effectiveness of these two models.

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The past decade has seen much discussion about the scope for national distinctiveness in employment relations in the context of the globalisation of corporations and markets. This paper employs historical data on aspects of working conditions in 11 nations’ manufacturing sectors to comment on the impact of supposedly intensifying global pressures. With no historic convergence of working conditions evidenced by a statistical analysis, the paper turns to preliminary econometric analysis to afford some purchase on the conditions which underpin continuing national distinctiveness. The results suggest that cross-national variation in the exposure of employees to managerial prerogative, whilst being far from the only influence, has played a substantial role in the shaping of working conditions.

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Under the Blair government, the education and training policy in the UK assumed a new weight of responsibility. Performing a key role in a range of social and economic policy areas, it was proclaimed as the 'Third Way'. In this paper, the author provides an overview of the main initiatives of the Blair government and examines the extent to which they reflect the principles of the Third Way. The initiatives are assessed and specific features of British economic and political life posing significant problems in implementing New Labour's version of the Third Way are highlighted. The verdict is that while there is considerable ambition and coherence in the educational strategy of the Blair government, the obstacles facing the government are also sizeable. Show less

It is increasingly accepted that improvements in productivity, competitiveness and social well-being depend not only on boosting skills supply but also ensuring that skills are utilised effectively inside the workplace. Skills utilisation is a relatively new policy area, however, and the evidence base upon which to formulate and develop new policy interventions is limited. In the UK, Scotland is leading the way on this agenda. This paper reports on the findings from a mid-term evaluation of the Scottish Funding Council's program of 'action research' projects, which are aimed at exploring the potential contribution of universities and colleges to improved skills utilisation in the workplace. The evaluation finds some initial empirical evidence for establishing proof of concept, but also identifies challenges in relation to capacity building and sustainability. The potential exists, it is argued, for the program to contribute to a broader approach to skills and innovation policy in Scotland.

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There has been a sharp divergence in the literature about the benefits of the growth of teamwork, with some claiming that it is solely in the interests of management, others that it is beneficial for employees and yet others that it makes little difference to either productivity or well-being. A feature of this debate is the lack of high quality representative data on employee experiences. This paper draws upon the British Skills Survey Series which provides a particularly rich source of evidence. It shows that, while teamwork did expand between the early 1990s and 2006, this was due primarily to the growth of the type of teamwork that allowed employees little in the way of decision-making power. Indeed there was a decrease in the prevalence of self-directive teamwork. At the same time our evidence shows that the benefits of teamwork, in terms of both productive potential and employee welfare, are confined to self-directive teams, while non-self-directive teams suppress the use of personal initiative and discretion at work.

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It is widely accepted that to produce high value products and services requires a well trained and skilled workforce. This paper seeks to make a contribution to unpicking the relationship between business strategy and skills in the service sector by presenting research findings from the UK fitness industry. This sector has been fast growing and includes companies who compete on the basis of high quality, alongside those competing largely on cost. If the route to a high skills economy is to shift firms to higher quality products, then we would expect to find that the more up-market employers make use of a workforce with higher levels of skill. The research from the fitness industry questions this simple relationship, finding that there is no clear link between competitive strategy and skills. As quality is not necessarily the impetus for improving the skills of the workforce, the paper then briefly explores the possible skill implications of a number of other developments currently taking place in the industry.

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Using data drawn from the 1997 and 2001 British Skills Surveys, which are large-scale cross-sectional representative surveys of working individuals, this paper aims both to make a contribution to understanding the returns to on-the-job training and to disaggregate the contributions of formal and informal learning to workers with different levels of skills (literacy, numeracy, and computing skills), engaging in different types of tasks under different work arrangements. We use an explicit control for the informal learning process that is generally neglected by empirical studies, mostly as a result of lack of relevant direct measures. Thanks to rare information on the centrality of skill usage, on the complexity of that use, on the nature of the duty and on how this duty is performed, we stratify the estimates by different groups of workers to allow the coefficient estimates on all the training regressors to vary by workers' status. The wage equations rely on Heckit corrections for formal training participation. The results show that not taking into account informal training explicitly in the wage equations may lead empirical assessments to bias the return to formal training upward. Nonetheless, wage premiums for a spell of formal training remain significant and positive in all of the models developed in the paper. Our results also reveal the complex relationships between the returns to formal and informal training, and the types of skills people were using, the type of work they were doing and how such work was organised. Amongst other results, we emphasise differentiated returns to formal and informal training depending on the complexity of tasks and show that, for certain types of workers carrying out specific duties, formal training may remain an efficient way to upgrade the skills and productivity of the labour force at low and intermediate levels of qualifications. Our estimates also exhibit that wage premiums for formal and informal training are higher and more significant for workers who perform their task in teams and are closely supervised.

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For two decades there have been calls for the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system to be more efficient, responsive, industry-driven, and simplified. The responses from governments of all political persuasions have generally been incremental and within the traditional VET rubric of supplying skills to the labour market. In 2002, the State of Queensland began experimenting with different models of interaction with the VET system and its stakeholders. Since then a range of alternative industry engagement mechanisms has been trialled within an integrated approach to skills formation spanning a number of policy areas. In general, and in speculation about possible future VET systems, each of these mechanisms was initially predicated on tracking of emerging economic, social and environmental challenges faced by western democracies. From these initial experiments, Queensland has been researching an alternative holistic VET system model for 2020 which hopefully will be more able to cope with the changing nature of occupations, work, and the requirements of a carbon-constrained economy. This paper discusses two early drafts of some tools and techniques being considered for managing and monitoring the system: (i) Monitoring and Performance Framework and (ii) Capability Scales.

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The 1971 Bolton Report, 'Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Small Firms', quantified, for the first time, the importance of the contribution made by the small business sector to the stability and development of the British economy and identified the main problems and barriers associated with its inherently large size, diversity and turbulence. One of the most important findings of the report related to the lack of vocational education and training (VET) among small business owners/managers and their workforce. Three decades later, the levels of VET and skill of small business owner/managers and their workforce remains largely unchanged. This paper is based upon a research study which combines three investigative and analytical approaches over a three-year period (1998-2000). It focuses on six recent training initiatives in Britain, evaluating the training impact of these initiatives upon the small businesses in terms of owner/manager awareness, understanding, interest and actual implementation rates. These initiatives are: Industry Training Organisations (ITOs); Investors in People (IiP); Business Links (BLs); Training and Local Enterprise Councils (TECs/LECs); National and Scottish Vocational Qualifications (NVQs/SVQs); and Modern Apprenticeships (MAs). Show less